AMD Radeon HD 6450 Pro Reviews

If all you want or need is an inexpensive video card to replace your PC's integrated graphics, then the AMD Radeon HD 6450 does the job. But that's about all it does.

On a pure performance-per-dollar perspective the 6450 comes up well short of the best, but we’d basically be a broken record at this point. It’s very rare to see new low-end products claim the top spot for their very narrow price bracket, even if a die shrink is involved. Even a slight discount on a more expensive product blows the entire lineup out of the water, and this is what happens with the 5570 and GT 430. So what do we do with a very low power, low performance, budget priced card? We throw it in our HTPCs of course! It’s here where we need to do some more aggressive testing as time allows, but the Radeon HD 6450 has all the makings of an excellent HTPC card.

Turning our attention toward the el-cheapo HD 6450, due to debut from £35, it's far more suited as a facilitator of multi-screen and multimedia technology than a gaming card. Medium-quality settings trip it up at a 1080p resolution, so while fine for the casual gamer, readers who play fast-paced games need to look further up the stack.

First, the Radeon HD 6450 isn't a particularly good deal for the money. The GeForce GT 430 can be had for about $5 more right now, and it was faster overall across our test suite. Second, you shouldn't buy either of those cards if you plan on doing any proper PC gaming. Yes, you'll double your graphics card budget by opting for, say, a vanila GeForce GTS 450 for $110 instead of a Radeon HD 6450 for $55. If you account for the cost of the rest of the system, however, that budget increase doesn't amount to much. More importantly, the small overall price increase leads to a massive performance increase. You're looking at literally three times the frame rate going from the 6450 to a GTS 450 or a 5770—perhaps a teeny bit less if you go with a vanilla card instead of one of the slightly souped-up models we tested, but still.

Faster than integrated graphics and fairly cheap, but still a card for casual gamers only.

Even though it is substantially faster than the previous generation Radeon HD 5450, AMD's new HD 6450 can not offer enough performance beyond the most basic gaming at 1024x768. As a gamer the better choice is to save up a bit of money by buying less games and then going for a ~$100 graphics card. Even though AMD markets this card as DirectX 11 compatible, DirectX 11 has no significance for this card. Whether you play DX8 or DX11 at 10 FPS makes no difference, it simply is unplayable.

Bottom line, if the Radeon HD 6450 DDR3 goes on sale for less than $50, it'd be a budget winner for an HTPC. Starting at $55, the GDDR5-based version of the Radeon HD 6450 is much closer to tough competition from Nvidia's GeForce GT 430 and AMD's own Radeon HD 5570, which makes it impossible to recommend.